Movies and TV series are a bigger deal than we think. They should not be marginalized as "only" entertainment. We can learn a lot about a society, about ourselves, from our viewing habits.

A popular image of the decaying Roman Empire is of citizens watching gladiators fighting to the death in the Coliseum, a show put on for them by the ruling elite. (We know about this ancient history because in numerous movies and TV series we watch them watching.) What we mostly remember of pre-Columbian Latin American theocracies is the masses getting to watch the stirring spectacle of splendid youth having their living hearts ripped out at the top of pyramids to appease the gods and impress the multitude.

Recently we have turned out in large numbers to watch the Hollywood blockbuster "Hunger Games" in which citizens turn out in large numbers to watch 20 teenagers kill each other off in a TV show.

The movie purports to be affording a glimpse into a dystopian society of a distant future. Yet its voyeuristic TV hoopla feels so familiar. Most obvious, I guess, is the resemblance to the long-running TV series "Survivor," with its winner-take-all competitions staged in a rigged wilderness.

"Hunger Games" is reminiscent of all our "reality," voyeurism-based competitions. It has an antecedent in "The Truman Show," a movie in which a man's whole life is, unbeknownst to him, a TV show presided over by producers. (A prescient vision given our current privacy issues and NSA nosiness.) In "Hunger Games" there's a hint of our culture's obsession with pro football, despite all the news stories on how the game ruins the brains and shortens the lives of the young men who play it, many of them among the lucky to have escaped from poverty.

There's even an echo of stories we read in newspapers of African child warriors murdering each other and others. Or of how we fight our (often unpopular) wars now, using mercenaries, mostly of less advantaged classes to whom it makes some kind of financial sense to sign up. (The "tributes" who participate in the Hunger Games come from the poor outlying districts to provide entertainment for the more affluent of the cities.) In "Hunger Games" nature is tricked out with cameras and audio. The young warriors are never off the grid. We may not be quite there yet, but with GPS and ubiquitous smart phones, we're getting there fast. "Nature" as something beyond the human, by definition off the grid, in which it's possible to get lost, is a phenomenon that will have to be explained to our grandchildren.

Sure, our current entertainments draw the line at the crucial snuff feature of the Hunger Games. And after all, it's only entertainment, not real life, right? But is the premise, the feeling, of the movie so very different? Given the big story of our time of demoralized youth coming out of college burdened with debt, with dismal prospects in the prevailing corporatocracy, is it such a leap to a competition with just one survivor in 20?

There's much that we can learn from "Hunger Games," not about human life gone terribly awry in the comfortingly distant future, but about ourselves right now.

Speaking of learning from our viewing pleasures, what about "Homeland"? This popular series somehow arranges for the audience to sympathize with and at times cheer on the heroic and caring agents of the CIA, the very outfit that contributed to the death of Salvador Allende in Chile, and, as we learned recently, helped racist South Africa imprison Nelson Mandela, the man the world has been honoring as one of the greatest human beings of our time. Neat trick, eh?

Or our thing about zombies — what's that all about?

Brent Harold of Wellfleet, a former English professor, blogs at brentharoldjournal.com. Email him at kinnacum@gmail.com.